Tag: landscape

Drawing Lesson Circa 1959

I know exactly when I learned to draw. It was April 1959 and I was six and a quarter. I had just drawn a man in a hat that I was rather proud of and I showed it to my Dad. He suggested that I really look at how a hat set on a man’s head. I had drawn it fully on top of the head, kind of balancing up there and he drew an example sketch to show how it really came part of the way down the head! (Remember in 1959 it was before JFK convinced men that they did not need to wear hats!)

I was able to copy his lesson pretty well. Wow! What a concept! To draw something all you really had to do was really **look** at it. I’ve had many art classes as an adult that said basically the same thing. The book I was looking at by Kevin Macpherson to try to get back into landscape painting says it too: “Paint what you see, not what you know”.

So when I started the painting below on location in Piscataway Park, I was trying to really look at the water since that seemed challenging. Kevin also says, “All paintings are lessons for the next.”

Accokeek Creek

Plein Air

So I have been painting more. My successful artist friend says he paints every single day! His work is quite beautiful so I presume a side benefit is ‘practice makes perfect’, but I’m afraid right now I’m motivated because it gives me something enjoyable to do. I like being outside and I like walking my dog. So my methodology is often to walk the dog while carrying my travel easel and to pause when I see something interesting to paint and then paint it. There is some necessity to work fast because the light will change too much if you don’t. That works for my dog. There is a special term in French for this painting outside activity: Plein Air. This landscape of a farm road was painted earlier this week.

Landscape Painting at Marshall Hall

I have a lot of memories Piscataway Park’s Marshall Hall site, former site of an amusement park and Southern Maryland gambling mecca, and also the current site of burned out historical mansion. I remember going there as a child in the amusement park days and once accidently wandering into a slot machine building where no one under sixteen was allowed. My husband worked the toy helicopters there as a teenager so that may have been our real first meeting, although I don’t actually remember riding the toy helicopters. I liked the mini-roller coaster better. My son was married there in an outdoor winter wedding where it was only about 10 degrees F outside. My late mother-in-law was born there in a long-gone house where she remembered as a baby sleeping in a room with snow blowing in through the cracks in the siding. There are still old amusement park rides rusting in the woods. I got the chromium for my element collection from an old rusting truck where the chrome trim was practically the only thing left. I remember riding my bike down to the site in 1981, when the mansion caught fire, with baby Piri in the rear bike seat, arriving in time to watch it smolder.

There is now a rutted old dirt road remaining that winds past the Marshall family cemetery and really doesn’t go anywhere. At the end of this road, I painted the scene of some trees overlooking the Potomac.